Ethnofiction and Its Impact on Postwar Japanese Cinema
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
arts Article Blurred Boundaries: Ethnofiction and Its Impact on Postwar Japanese Cinema Jennifer Coates Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR14DH, UK; [email protected] Received: 24 December 2018; Accepted: 31 January 2019; Published: 2 February 2019 Abstract: This article explores the use of ethnofiction, a technique emerging from the field of visual anthropology, which blends documentary and fiction filmmaking for ethnographic purposes. From Imamura Shohei’s¯ A Man Vanishes (Ningen johatsu¯ , 1967) to Hou Hsiao Hsien’s Cafe Lumieré (Kohi¯ jiko¯, 2003), Japanese cinema, including Japan-set and Japan-associated cinema, has employed ethnofiction filmmaking techniques to alternately exploit and circumvent the structural barriers to filmmaking found in everyday life. Yet the dominant understanding in Japanese visual ethnography positions ethnofiction as an imported genre, reaching Japan through Jean Rouch and French cinema-verité. Blending visual analysis of Imamura and Hou’s ethnofiction films with an auto-ethnographic account of my own experience of four years of visual anthropology in Kansai, I interrogate the organizational barriers constructed around geographical perception and genre definition to argue for ethnofiction as a filmmaking technique that simultaneously emerged in French cinema-verité and Japanese feature filmmaking of the 1960s. Blurring the boundaries between Japanese, French, and East Asian co-production films, and between documentary and fiction genres, allows us to understand ethnofiction as a truly global innovation, with certain regional specificities. Keywords: ethnofiction; Japan; documentary; non-fiction; dramatization 1. Introduction Scholarship on global cinemas is scarred by a number of organizational barriers. One of the most detrimental to a holistic understanding of the field may be the division of film texts along national lines, and by genre. In practice, such divisions are often meaningless. A significant number of filmmakers innovate across national boundaries in relation to setting, funding, casting, and exhibition, while genre-defying film texts have tested scholarly definition since the beginning of Film Studies. Certain key trends in Japanese feature filmmaking clearly illustrate the value of taking a more inclusive approach to understanding genre development, thematic trends, and technical innovation. This article explores Japanese cinema’s use of ethnofiction, a technique associated with visual anthropology that blends documentary and fiction filmmaking for ethnographic purposes. From Imamura Shohei’s¯ A Man Vanishes (Ningen johatsu¯ , 1967) to Hou Hsiao Hsien’s Cafe Lumieré (Kohi¯ jiko¯, 2003), postwar Japanese feature films, including Japan-set and Japan-associated films, have employed ethnofiction filmmaking techniques to explore the human condition, alternately exploiting and circumventing the structural barriers to filmmaking that are presented by the physical constraints of bringing a camera into everyday lives and spaces. Feature films such as Imamura and Hou’s discussed below draw from spontaneously occurring events in the lives of everyday people, and from the environments in which these people live, to create semi-documentary or partly fictionalized stories. The close relation that these stories bear to a lived reality or perceived truth then allows the filmmaker to make claims about their depiction of an imagined human condition. Arts 2019, 8, 20; doi:10.3390/arts8010020 www.mdpi.com/journal/arts Arts 2019, 8, 20 2 of 12 As the first part of this article demonstrates, fictionalized elements including staging, re-enactment, the use of props, and scripted scenes and dialogue, have been a part of the broader genre of documentary film in Japan since the beginnings of film itself. Yet in the field of anthropology, the dominant understanding in Japanese visual ethnography positions ethnofiction as an imported genre, arriving in Japan in the late 1950s through the work of Jean Rouch and French cinema verité. Blending analysis of Imamura and Hou’s ethnofiction films with an auto-ethnographic account of my own experience of four years of visual anthropology work in Kansai, I interrogate the organizational barriers constructed around geographical and genre definitions to argue for ethnofiction as a filmmaking technique that simultaneously developed in French cinema verité and Japanese feature filmmaking of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, continuing to influence contemporary filmmaking in East Asia today. While it is not possible within the limits of this essay to deal with the development of ethnofiction techniques in commercial filmmaking through the 1980s and 1990s, I hope these two examples from either end of the postwar ethnofiction trend demonstrate how the technique became more mainstream, both across genres and across East Asia more broadly. Blurring the boundaries between Japanese, French, and East Asian filmmaking, and between documentary and fiction genres, allows us to understand ethnofiction as a truly global innovation, with certain regional specificities. There are numerous definitions of ethnofiction (also written ethno-fiction), but for the purposes of this article I will use the definition adopted by the ethnofiction study group I joined at The National Museum of Ethnography in Osaka, Japan. As the last section of this article describes, the study group was largely comprised of Japanese practice-based researchers in the field of anthropology, working in fieldsites other than Japan. During the making of my own documentary film on memories of postwar cinema in Japan (Coates 2018), I screened several of Imamura’s films for the group, initiating an on-going discussion about the history of ethnofiction filmmaking in Japan outside the specific scholarly field of anthropology. Group members worked from Johannes Sjöberg’s outline of ethnofiction as a genre in which “the camera simply follows the subjects’ improvisations of their own, and others’, lived experiences” (Sjöberg 2008, p. 229). Sjöberg identifies ethnofiction as emerging in 1950s France in the work of director Jean Rouch, and the term as a coinage of the film critics of the era (Sjöberg 2008, p. 229). Paul Stoller describes Rouch’s method as follows: It is not a documentary that attempts to capture an observed reality. By the same token it is not a melodrama the filmmakers dreamed up to titillate our emotions ... These films are stories based on laboriously researched and carefully analysed ethnography. In this way Rouch uses creative licence to “capture” the texture of an event, the ethos of lived experience (Stoller 1992, p. 143). While I am arguing here for the development of ethnofiction filmmaking as multi-local and simultaneous, as well as for more scholarly blurring of the boundaries between documentary and feature film, the “varying degrees of commitment to ethnographic research that was represented through fiction” in Rouch’s work (Sjöberg 2008, p. 230) provides a working definition of the term ethnofiction for the discussion that follows. However, I do not wish to imply that any director, auteur, or even anthropologist may be credited with independently developing something like a ‘true’ ethnofiction. Given the formal and informal media flows of the 1950s and 1960s, including amateur film club screenings and study group screenings conducted in the Japanese film studio workplaces which are difficult to trace, it is not possible to argue with any certainty that the filmmakers discussed below were not influenced by one another’s films and methods. Instead, I wish to demonstrate how ethnofiction is presented in filmmakers’ own discourse as a commonsense technique for developing and communicating stories about everyday life. The final paragraphs contrast this approach to ethnofiction-like techniques with the more canonical account of ethnofiction in visual anthropology in Japan today. Arts 2019, 8, 20 3 of 12 2. Results 2.1. Early Ethnofictions and the Problem of Terminology The question of language is crucial to understanding the emergence and development of techniques such as ethnofiction in two broad aspects—definition and translation. When we speak across disciplinary boundaries and language barriers, we are often using different words to talk about the same phenomenon, or conversely, using shared terms to discuss very different concepts. Tracing the emergence and development of ethnofiction through Japanese cinema history makes clear the confusions, misunderstandings, and miscommunications that can occur when we try to discuss visual techniques in multiple languages, and from different academic fields or perspectives. Focusing first on the question of definition, it is clear that this problem is not unique to ethnofiction filmmaking. In fact, the multiple origin stories of filmmaking and cinema exhibition in Japan revolve around the question of our definition of “cinema”. Closely following the arrival of Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope in Kobe in November 1896, and the Vitascope in 1897, the Lumière brothers’ Cinematograph was brought to Japan by businessman Inabata Katsutaro.¯ While Edison’s technology was exhibited in the style of an interactive museum object, with viewers approaching the Kinetoscope one by one to look through the lens, Inabata hosted the first open commercial film screening at the Nanchi Enbujo Theatre in Osaka from 15 February 1897 after a two-week trial screening in Kyoto from 20 January 1987. The commercial Kyoto screening later opened to the public in March 1897. Kobe, Kyoto, and Osaka city governments have all